


Our days are never coming back

by verywhale



Series: Reminders [1]
Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Crossdressing, Dissociation, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, M/M, References to Canon, Repressed Memories, Selfcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:20:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23626021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verywhale/pseuds/verywhale
Summary: Arthur and Joker are finally free, but now they miss their mother and all that they can barely remember.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Joker (Joker 2019)
Series: Reminders [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1701832
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Our days are never coming back

**Author's Note:**

> For all my 🃏🌼 friends.
> 
> The title is taken from [Highway Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st5EaJsXz64) by System of A Down.

He lies on the top of the carefully made bed, back to the restless sun, still as warm as of summer. Arthur’s head is on the same level as his chest, and he slightly cocks it to see the sunbeams pass through his face, framing all its bridges and sockets with muted deep shadows. But there’s no sadness in it; his eyes meet Arthur’s and they wince in a light laughter, still uncontrollable but no longer repulsive.

Red and blue watercolors drip gently along his transparent cheeks, and Arthur wants to run his fingers over them and make them even messier, even more genuine. But his hands lie still on the top of his heart, which takes an extra beat when another rivulet of paint runs through its lacy pattern. And he keeps looking and tracing their race until the beat ceases and only emptiness stays for him to fill it whole.

He sees through Arthur’s thoughts—he always does, as long as they keep ricocheting off each other and the walls of Arthur’s skull. He brings his own hand to his face, and Arthur feels that he’s wet and sheer and touching him is like touching air after the storm. Hollow spots show up right where the fingers left their marks. He only has to turn on the other side to let the paint run by itself and cover up these little gaps of void again.

They are still wearing these things they’ve picked up before the time had lost in itself, coiled its roads so to unravel them wouldn’t make any sense anymore. Only one of the recent nights peeks through the white noise. The night when the smoke was twirling uselessly and screaming red was running over the impassive blue, and Arthur’s mouth and lungs were bleeding while he was laughing. The couch was to witness it, and so was the journal and the gun and that file filled with memories that did not belong to him. But that laughter was unmistakably his, and Arthur laughed as if he wanted to get rid of it at last, of everything that continued to remind him of something cold and distant and pointlessly malicious. And he was here to pick up and devour Arthur’s laughter, just as everything he could no longer keep in himself.

His hair falls on his neck, and it stains the shirt with its electric green. The suit he’s adopted is of beautiful shade of maroon, like the sky at dusk when it tells of the tempest incoming. Yet Arthur can’t help but squint his eyes and try to catch the glimmer of sun that would change it into something lighter, as light as his head devoid of things that should be there, but do not want to. He’s not afraid to touch the fabrics, to slide his fingers over the row of buttons on his vest and maybe undo one or two just out of impulse. Arthur knows this touch would be the same as when he’s sensed his face. But he stays laying whist, legs straight and close, palms neatly arranged on the top, as if someone else has done it before pressing on his eyes and dropping the casket lid. A sour bit of regret sits on his tongue when he realizes that he has forgotten to arrange his mother’s limbs this way too.

His rouged smile swiftly turns upside down when Arthur thinks of her. He brushes his elbow against his side, imitates the anxious spasms of his mother’s arms. Her arms, they haven’t been still, but rather grasping on the vanity of her life, brittle as her nose cartilage under pressure.

He’s been waiting for Arthur to take a look back, to let him see how she fancies it now, robbed of breath and recaps of her life and wishes that never came true. But Arthur has stood under the sun, smoke yet tickling his nostrils and blood pumping behind his ears and besides his eyes in a way that has made him strangely merry. Strangely as his mouth has not elongated and his teeth have not gleamed and his lids still have been serenely closed, and he hasn’t dared to disturb this triumphant silence. For once, Arthur’s felt that breathing has become easier without a certain someone taking it away from him. But he has been pressuring Arthur to take a turn back, to open his eyes to what has been left of the woman he’s remembered to call mother, of her spread limbs and trapped mouth and dull emptiness instead of what she used to be—all but his own imagery, mere assumptions and urges. But Arthur has only dropped the pillow, eyes still shut and relentless, and left her white polished tomb before he’s had a chance to see their impact.

Arthur feels a slight itch in his nose and his brows tilt by themselves when he speaks. “I miss her,” he says, looking above Arthur rather than at him.

There’s a familiar tremble popping up on his temples, but instead of bringing joy and relief it punches him with chargin and defiance. “What are you talking about,” Arthur mutters through his teeth, almost trying to keep some unwanted words from erupting.

“We are in her room, on her bed, there are her things everywhere, but she’s not around!” He pretends not to mind Arthur’s bitter comment. “It doesn’t seem right, you know.”

An irked chuckle stops in Arthur’s throat. He stares into the bleached ceiling, faint yellow spots spilling here and there as the reminders of some accidents in the apartments above theirs. And he doesn’t skew his sight anywhere aside this wide spot as it is dull and speechless and barren of that personality the walls and the furniture have.

Countless trinkets of variety of uselessness. They litter the room and cannot shut up, cannot stop speaking of names and events that are as far away as the pictures on the TV screen, but still annoyingly painful. He knows that Virgin Mary and infant Jesus are glaring at him from the icon while he’s caged in denial; and the fans and curtains and fake flowers flutter with gossip, unashamed of Arthur’s presence; and the mirror behind them cannot wait but to shove the reflection of his reddened eyes and twitching lips into his face. Tasteless red flowers bloom on the whiteness of walls, turned dusty from age and neglect, and they surround Arthur, not letting him run away. Brilliant red, bold and distinct, wanting to be seen, smeared imperfectly just like his smile. Their laughs and offhand remarks urge him to turn his sight to them, and their voices are but ugly copies of his mother’s last gasps. But he stays lying still. A corpse observing the preparations for his burial.

It seems weird to Arthur, to miss that woman now. His hands remember the softness and weightlessness of his weapon. They remember the merciless load he has applied without looking or responding to her hopeless jolts. But no matter how the pieces of her, scattered in this room, try to convince and remind him, neither the hands or eyes or ears of his can collect any further flashbacks and recognize them as such. There are strokes that he should remember, kind pats on the head, careful grasps on the wrist. Her raspy voice calling him Happy, the sting in the ears when she says it. Hugs, kisses, bruises. His throat is stifled and his arms are deprived of movement as some piece of her clothing keeps him together with the radiator. Whether it’s winter or summer, this thing is colder than ice, and this cold turns his lips blue, just like those fresh marks all over his malnourished body.

Arthur groans and his hands are now pressed to his face, wet and sheer and pulsing with the heat of his pique. No, he doesn’t remember and that boy isn’t him and that woman isn’t his mother.

Arthur hears the chuckle and ruffle and creak of the bed as he lifts from it. Uneven playful steps are followed by a grumpy moan of a drawer and the rustle of paper and cardboard. These dreamy places where the sun goes down around the midnight and the salty breeze knocks into the ornate white wickets might be existing only on these postcards, washed out and flown away while the clock has been tickling. Arthur frees his face and rolls on the side when he returns with a large album in his hands, brown and scratchy and heavy with something Arthur doesn’t want to think of. Something that belongs to Arkham Asylum for sure.

“Why did you take this out?” Arthur asks, irritated by the sincerity of his sorrowful smile. “I don’t want to look at the photos.”

“Do you ever think about someone else but yourself?” he says, slamming the album open. Arthur’s mouth is ajar and his pupils are racing, as there are no human sounds to depict his shock upon such audacity. And it’s him to say this out of all people! Arthur stands on his elbow and brashly pulls the album to himself.

His smile grows from somber to jolly when he flashes his teeth. While Arthur turns the album over to see the pictures unflipped, he jumps over it and lies so closely that he can sense that hectic throbbing nothingness against his back. His head is on the level of Arthur’s chest, and Arthur flinches before paying attention back to the photos.

“Look at her!” he yelps, brimming with unnecessary amounts of bliss. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Arthur doesn’t say anything as he skims over and over the multiple faces of his mother smiling at him. On most pictures she’s confident and serene, her youth preserved in these grainy tints of blacks and greys—akin to her wardrobe filled with clothes she has kept as reminders of her old world of dreams. But right where he presses his head to Arthur’s chest, something is creeping—hazy and stingy and heavy like mud. The photos seem incomplete, as if the real faces have been cut out and these smiles and calm looks he observes are just his illusions crawling out of blank pearly spots.

“You look just like her right there,” he says, pointing at the picture of her a few pages onward.

She stands alone, in a light patterned dress, with a bouquet of flowers in her hands; another smile nothing more than a vain little wish. It makes him want to feel something. Anger that would force him to run from one corner to another, and his voice to crumble under the rubble of truthful screams and demands that are way too luxurious for everyone but himself. Sadness, excruciating and desperate, as he’s now all by himself—no better choice given, with all this rejection burning him down. Joy of conquest, an opposite side of that sadness, that allows him to revel in his infinite loneliness and laugh into warped faces of all this junk that besieges him in this room. But Arthur stares at that void of a smile on a picture of someone who once has been his mother, and scoffs when this excavation for any emotion proves to be fruitless.

“I don’t know what you are trying to say,” Arthur breathes; a few pages have exhausted him more than a run across Gotham in his ridiculous work shoes.

He withdraws his fingers from the photos, and Arthur watches their imprints leave little shadows—right around the eyes and the lips and the wrists. He makes them come forth, explode with color Arthur gives to his world; and he choses them to be shining mauve, with dirty specks of brown and crowns of fading yellow.

And some dots on his mother’s dress would be red, says he, jammed between its native pattern, shy but uncomfortably visible. And the flowers can stay white, but their stems and leaves must dissipate at the slightest contact, and the way the petals twirl away from the viewer isn’t the same which they have had before being picked and presented.

He closes the album and turns over to face Arthur. Eyes gleaming with hollow impatience, he grins at this desolate look Arthur gives him. If he touched his cheeks again and pressed until he heard an uneasy hiss, what kind of color would raise through the paint?

“I’m saying that I miss her,” he repeats as his fingers slide between Arthur’s, and he senses an uppity grip forming around.

And then he stands up; and his clamp is indeed sturdy enough to pull Arthur after him. Tiny moans and giggles arise as he drags Arthur away from the bed, and towards the wardrobe, while the fans and half-empty perfume flasks are watching in awe. With each step, a new streak of sweat runs along Arthur’s back; and when his free hand opens the door, he stops to gulp and exhale but he can’t. It must be the dust and morbid warmth exuding from this crate full of calls from the past, the time which he’s never lived through— _stop, stop it, shut up, you won’t make me believe such nonsense_ —

“I want to see her again.”

His voice is soft and stuffed and smothering like the pillow Arthur remembers holding. Both of his hands now run over Arthur’s hoodie and shirt. At this moment, Arthur forgets about anything other than this gross heap of things that emerged from the photo album, through the prism of his mind, right in the room which can’t stop mocking and poking.

“Which one do you think was on _that_ picture?” he asks before suddenly letting go of Arthur’s clothes. And now he jumps on hundreds of legs, tapping and rifling her dresses with hundreds of hands, stopping for brief seconds when the web of his fingers entangles some small gaps and stray threads hanging in wrong places. He frowns when he sees Arthur step a bit aside, trapped in confusion that has stripped every dress of each color and pattern and fused them together. The chaos of memories taken from someone distant, turned tangible and now pulsing; relentlessly pulsing, leaving fractures across Arthur’s skull.

Arthur’s hand is grabbed again and forced against linen and silk of the wardrobe’s insides. The fabrics shiver, and their little shocks extend through Arthur’s bones and ligaments. He finds himself watched from the side as he ruffles, gropes within these mnemonics in a way the figure in red gropes each lobe of his brain. He doesn’t really know what to look for. But since he has mentioned that picture, now adorned with splashes of purples and browns, he might have an idea—knocking shyly, yet undecided whether it can introduce itself now. Why does she own so many dresses, Arthur asks himself. Even more than those perfumes and vases and obvious copies of historical paintings, moulding and perishing in front of his eyes while he’d have a smoke and a TV dinner. She smoked too, _yes! Alright, you’_ _ve seen_ _it on one of the photos if you still don’t believe me._

Arthur finds it shoved way behind, half-slipping from the hanger; and exactly for a reason already recovered while he's been coloring the photo with life. The dress was probably of a more vivid blue before. The blue of a clear river during a sunny day, rather than of a sky peeking through fog around the high-rise buildings. There are tiny flowers dotted all over its bodice and skirt and these angular sleeves, purposefully cut in the midst of a shoulder. But when he moves other dresses aside and lets it fall into his arms, he discovers that original pattern added to it some time later. It is as timid and unintentionally evident as he has imagined, escaping from the neckline and down to the waist. And its tint is no longer crimson as it must’ve been on the application, but now maroon. Deep scorched maroon, like the dots on his bare right wrist, and the suit Arthur has gifted to his truer self.

If he were laughing, he would laugh even louder, even merrier. If he were hugging Arthur, firmly and with no room to move around—like he always does—he would clench him so closely that all air would burst out from Arthur’s lungs. And now his smile is all teeth and squinted eyes and soft gasps which he cannot stop. Arthur is pushed back on the bed, and his outfit is being picked apart, while he diverts his shameful gaze and tries to insert some excuses in-between. Ah, he’s been wearing this since the time has looped and he’s teleported through rain and tears and race of sirens from Arkham to home, to someone else’s home, back to Arkham, back to his mother’s bed, back to his mother’s other bed. Ah, it’s all sweat and burns and cuts and days-old dirt, and my hair is reeking with greaze, and you don’t really have to do it. But while he’s shooting these words in silence, his boring and modest attire is now lying dismantled on the floor.

The first thing to come to Arthur’s attention is how the bodice perfectly shapes itself around his chest; and his ears become hollow and he can touch the flames catching on his neck and cheeks. The skirt hangs down all scrunched, lacking something to give it fullness and shape. But he doesn’t have any space in his head to care of these little things, when his eyes run back and forth over Arthur’s new look, so pretty and mercurial and simply perfected by that bewilderment on his glowing face.

And then Arthur just laughs. Hand slapping the knee, heel kicking the bed; he laughs and hears himself being doubled. They don’t see each other laughing as he has dropped his head on Arthur’s hips, and Arthur’s vision no longer exists under the coat of gleeful tears. They sense each other’s bodies vibrating under the spasms of their laughter. And when coughs start coming up and clogging the throats, it takes only a short gag to continue. The paints are still tricking down—they have never stopped—and the youth emerges when the jubilant blue returns to the dress, even if just in a couple of spots.

He feels Arthur straighten up and lifts his head. One look, and he’s back on his feet while Arthur jumps off the bed, observing the length of his legs below the towering skirt. His eyes are now half-lidded and he pouts like he’s seen bold and sensual actresses do in the movies. No so-called sweat and greaze and hair bothers him anymore.

“Come on, dance with me!” Arthur says, not before dropping a mockup of a curtsey. Now this is what he _does_ remember, and the grin runs across his face as he gives in.

It’s not like that time in the bathroom, when Arthur’s been too high on fear and strange ecstasy ringing in his ears. Right now, he can sense the control of his body when he takes away the lead after letting himself be arched back. A new pair of smiles pops up at every lift of Arthur’s skirt, as leisurely as their twirls that get the skirt flowing at the first place. The radio is off, and there is no need for it, when the tranquil and lamentful tune forms by itself as they flutter like waves under the breeze. They slide together towards the door, their legs copying each other’s movements with a scary precision. There’s the same look, sanguine and resolved, shared between two of them either.

“Oh, there’s one more thing!” he exclaims, and Arthur’s irises shrink from all possible ideas. But what he does is to jump to the mirror, littered with too many things to consider, and takes out a heap of white fake flowers from the vase. Arthur doesn’t have spare laughs anymore, so his face just grows long and flushed. He puts the bouquet behind his back, much to Arthur’s silent amusement, and takes his hand again to dance into the living room.

Even more chaos meets them in the other room, with Arthur’s belongings thrown around in places they don’t like. But he continues to twist Arthur and manoeuver in those narrow spaces between the appointments. He’s only slowly crawling himself while Arthur sets up the pace, for the flowers in his other hand have already paved their path behind him.

He stops next to the armchair and Arthur looks at him confused why he has halted the dance. Then he breaks the fragile link between their fingers and flashes on the other side of the seat with a broad gesture towards it. Arthur’s face freezes with an odd emotion, but his legs are shaking and he doesn’t know where to turn away. Yet the silence seems dangerously compeling, like a gun to the nape, and the faint but tenacious rhythm of the clock echoes behind his ribcage.

And so Arthur accepts no other choice but to drop in this armchair. It almost tries to reject him, to feel as uncomfortable as an old, crooked, unfamiliar piece of furniture can. And he hands Arthur the flowers; half of the petals already missing, another endangered to be crushed with a single touch. And Arthur takes them from him and lays them on his knees, barely covered by the crumpled hem. The sun has disappeared while they have been dancing, and the clouds might’ve bypassed the windows to veil the surroundings in its thickened dullness—that’s how bleak all has become. All save for the smeared smile which he now presses against Arthur’s lips.

It’s all smoky grime and salt of uncertainty they taste on each other, but Arthur would always take this over everything. He longs for a kiss that could make him forget that time exists, however clumsy it could’ve been; but he has other plans for Arthur today. His lips are swift and ticklish, no more than rubs and brushes; on the chin, on the cheeks. One turn of a head; he is determined to trap these brief teasing kisses, but he makes their noses bump instead. He smiles with his teeth again, and Arthur sees that they no longer contrast with the glaze of the makeup—as there’s been nothing to contrast with.

The void where the pigments tear off and stick to where he has touched Arthur, is filled with a sheer blank of a face. A photograph emerged in life. And Arthur wears these two blooming smiles when an urge to embellish his mask with the mottles of mauve, shifting then into browns and yellows electrifies the nips of his fingers.


End file.
